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You've definitely highlighted a big problem here. The rules are pretty arbitrary and subject to interpretation. There is no objective answer here that any Google algorithm can ever perfectly uncover. How can they determine intent by algorithm? I don't think its possible to equitably do this.

In a sense, I think this is related to the political theory that you punch up. In politics, you attack candidates who are threats to you, poll higher than you, etc.

In social media, you reach out to influencers and people who have more weight than you and who can give you a legitimate boost.

It's not a perfect analogy, but its the type of tactic that is definitely effective. The only downside is that it takes a non-trivial amount of effort to execute and can have zero positive impact if you're not succesful.

I think that a lot of the culture of a community can actually be guided by the administrators. For instance, when Reddit was first launched, the admins famously spent a good deal of their time creating fake account names and posting the kind of content that they wanted to see on the site. They directly guided the creation of the culture they ended up with by creating it and molding it themselves. I would venture a guess that other communities that have a strong culture (everything from corporate guided pages like Pinterest where the community wants to and expects to see cool products posted to comedy and trolling dregs of the internet like 4chan, DirtyPhoneBook, SomethingAwful, etc) were deliberately crafted to go in such a direction. I think more people here are more focused on the former, and that's where a traditional approach works best. But the interesting thing about the internet is that tribes form and people end up gravitating towards and finding people that share their value systems.

I'll be honest. I never thought that Google Plus was going to take off. Particularly after Google followed corporate (and possible NSA) interests in instituting their real name policy shortly after launch. They didn't differentiate themselves enough from Facebook to be any sort of cool competitor that would really inspire the imagination of people to get them to switch over when their friends are all on Facebook. But the ballgame changes if they ultimately end up tweaking their algorithm so that posts and social sharing on Google Plus directly impacts search results in a positive way as mentioned here. How far could Google go?

If Google tweaked their search algorithm in a certain way to favor Google Plus, it could be an amazing kick in the pants for every business out there that is currently putting their Facebook page in their TV ads, using the types of services at

Facebook is trying to create a real search engine and search features, but outside of their social data I don't think they're there yet and that will take time for them to develop what Google has over the past decade.

So the real question is if Google can become Facebook faster than Facebook can become Google?

The only frustrating aspect of this is that you can do 100% of the ethically right things according to Google's recommendations and best practices and your competitors can be doing the wrong things and you still end up getting hosed whenever there's an update. The best thing you can do is always to be scientific about things and measure and use real data to determine what your strengths and weaknesses are and improve them. But even knowing all of this, it can be frustrating when your business depends on the whim of a black box that you never get to see inside.

The big problem here is that there is no absolute determinate answer to this question of how long it takes. Even if you do things perfectly, you're subject to the whims of a third party. You have to be professional enough to explain it them even when it sometimes costs you sales when somebody else makes a random promise that they can't deliver.

Captchas are very frustrating, particularly for older people with worse vision or non-technical people who don't understand things. I'd rather err on the side of caution and make it easier for customers to interact with a site and purchase and deal with a bit of extra spam rather than making it impossible for legitimate customers to purchase.

I'll be honest, while charities do need to do outreach, I'm not a big fan of charities using things like AdWords and doing other advertising. That's when a charity starts to become a corporation and focusing more on fundraising rather than doing good works. I think the most promising future funding model problem lays in crowdsourcing - charities find these crowdfunding sites and post projects and charitable works that they want to fund and the community dictates which projects are most urgent through donations.